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Rethinking Public Key Infrastructures and Digital Certificates

Posted on March 24th, 2006

Proposes the use of digital certificates to ensure the privacy of electronic communications. Offers many explanations why this would be a good system to use instead of traditional signatures paper methods, and gives potential applications for the technology such as electronic postage and health care information storage.

Description

This book proposes highly practical cryptographic building blocks that can be used to design privacy-protecting electronic communication and transaction systems. The new techniques allow individuals, groups, and organizations to communicate and transact securely, in such a way that at all times they can determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is revealed to others, and to what extent others can link or trace this information. At the same time, the new techniques minimize the risk of identity fraud, overcome many of the efficiency and security shortcomings of the currently available mechanisms, and offer a myriad of benefits to organizations. They can be implemented in low-cost smartcards without cryptographic coprocessors, admit elliptic curve implementations with short keys, and encompass today’s views about digital certificates and public key infrastructures as a special case.